"Charity Will Judge"

Mary Tudor in 1554, Hans Eworth, Wikimedia Commons

In late 1553, Sir James Hales, a prominent English judge and a confirmed Protestant, was imprisoned for his refusal to conform to Catholicism. After several months of imprisonment, Hales bowed to pressure; he rejected the Protestant Church and was formally reinstated as a Christian in good standing in the Catholic Church. Hales quickly came to regret his decision, and while in prison, his despair over his decision to convert led him to attempt suicide. Hales’ suicide attempt was unsuccessful, but England’s reigning queen, the Catholic Mary Tudor, was deeply dismayed by his action, and after meeting with Hales to express her sympathy, she ordered his release from prison.

Unfortunately, Hales’ release from prison brought him no comfort and in August of 1554, while visiting his nephew, Hales chose to drown himself rather than continue his life.

For committing suicide in sixteenth-century England, Hales was viewed as a criminal. In the wake of his suicide, Sir James Dyer, the Lord Chief Justice, declared that “the forfeiture of the goods and chattels, real and personal, of Sir James [Hales] shall have relation to the act done in his lifetime.” Much to the dismay of Sir James Hales’ family, all of his property was now seized by the English Crown. Queen Mary, who had once been so sympathetic to Hales’ troubles, now owned all of his worldly goods.

Chief Justice Dyers’ insistence upon a posthumous punishment of Sir James Hales and his family was a reflection of a deeply ingrained belief in sixteenth-century England that suicide was not simply a crime; it was one of the most abhorrent of all crimes.

While the word “suicide” itself did not come into use until 1651, the practice of “self-murder,” as suicide was termed, has a much older history in England. Defined at its most basic level by early modern Britons as “the voluntary destroying of a man’s owne life by himself or his owne means and procurement,” suicide or self-murder was deemed to be “in itself evil.” On a more complex level, suicide was viewed as a direct assault upon God; suicides were believed to be directly denying life, which was the gift of God. For these reasons alone, suicide was to be condemned.

But, sixteenth-century reasons for rejecting and condemning suicide were also rooted in the widespread belief that suicide was a form of murder. It was under this definition that suicide had become a crime in England during the tenth century. By the fourteenth century, a period in which a massive pandemic had sent mortality rates in England soaring, it had become common for the courts to seize the property of the deceased, thereby penalizing not only the suicide but also his or her family and heirs. Because it was believed that with every suicide, “the king hath lost a subject...[and had] his peace broken,” this kind of excessive punishment was believed necessary to prevent suicide.

Beginning in the sixth century, if not earlier, Christian doctrine had consistently and unequivocally condemned suicide. Arguing that “he that kills another [may only kill]...his body but he that kills himself kills his own soul,” theologians insisted that Christians who committed suicide deserved to be permanently expelled from the Christian community. As a result, canon law (church law) forbade Christian burials for all suicides.While not all sixteenth-century English men and women would have agreed with the sixteenth-century minister, Samuel Bird, who believed that dragging the bodies of suicides face down through the streets would serve as a successful deterrent against future suicides, burial practices were often used as public forms of punishment for both the suicide and his or her family. Europeans buried those who committed suicide at crossroads, a practice which may have originated from the pagan Teutonic practice of performing human sacrifices at crossroads or, more simply, from a desire to publicize the suicide’s crime and punishment. Usually buried in north-south positions, suicides faced away from the direction in which it was believed the Last Judgement would first appear. These extraordinarily punitive actions underscored the widespread belief, rooted in Christian doctrine, that suicides were unworthy of Christian mercy.

While the roots of Protestantism were somewhat tenuous in sixteenth-century England, the Reformation sparked a shift in how English men and women viewed suicide and death. At the most basic level, the number of formal religious services conducted for the dead and dying was reduced. With this decline in formal services, sixteenth-century men and women also became increasingly responsible for their own salvation.

As the Catholic belief in the idea of a purgatory---a place in which the dead could gain forgiveness for actions taken during their lifetime---declined, death and the sins of the dead became more absolute. Superficially, it could be argued that attitudes toward suicide should have been unaffected by this change as the Church both forbade people from praying for suicides after their death and insisted that suicides could never be redeemed. However, religious practices always deviated from Church doctrine and many people had undoubtedly prayed for the souls of those whom they loved who had committed suicide. But by the mid-sixteenth century, even this type of consolation was denied the families of suicide, making the action of a suicide seem even more draconian.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Public Domain

Understanding Suicide While early modern religious beliefs led many English men and women to condemn suicide in extremely harsh terms, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries also witnessed a growing awareness that the causes of suicide were complex. Throughout this period, a surprising number of English scholars and writers explored the topic of suicide. Perhaps the most famous of these scholars was Robert Burton, whose tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, was first published in 1621.

Although nearly all English men and women acknowledged that a link existed between suicide and melancholy, few physicians were in agreement as to just what melancholy was and why it occurred. Burton’s description of melancholy – both its causes and symptoms – sounds, to modern readers, suspiciously similar to what we would call depression.

Like many of his peers, Burton saw melancholy as a disease that most commonly afflicted the upper classes. In many ways, this argument reflected the widespread belief that the upper classes were more innately sensitive than the lower classes who were widely viewed as coarse and insensitive.By linking melancholy with the upper class, Burton and others inadvertently glamorized melancholy and made it socially acceptable. This did not, however, mean that suicide, which many scholars linked to melancholy, was acceptable. But, this did allow Burton and others to publicly espouse some sympathy for those who did commit suicide. As Burton himself noted, “What happens to one may happen to any. Who knows how he may be tempted? It is his case; it may be thine. We should ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are, charity will judge.”

Burton’s call for sympathy for those who chose suicide was not completely unique. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth-century, courts had sometimes returned verdicts which denied that a suicide had occurred (even when it was obvious that a suicide had indeed occurred); courts probably returned these verdicts in an attempt to protect the suicide’s family and allow for the Christian burial of the suicide himself or herself.

What was unique, to some degree, with Burton’s work and the growing number of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century authors who wrote about the links between suicide and melancholy was the emphasis on the idea of melancholy or depression as a physical illness. Equally unique was the very public call for sympathy for those who chose suicide.

None of this meant, however, that legal or religious ideas about suicide changed during this period. Some courts might chose to skirt the law by claiming that a suicide was not a suicide or the individual in question had been insane (if a suicide was deemed insane at the time of death the usual punitive measures were waived), but overall suicides and their families continued to be subjected to the same harsh punishments in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries that they had been subjected to in the Middle Ages: the Anglican Church continued to follow the practices of the Catholic Church, denying suicides the right to be buried in consecrated ground, and the law continued to treat suicides as murderers.

While attitudes about suicide began to shift during the nineteenth century, the lingering effects of these harsh punishments and punitive views of suicide on European and American cultures have undoubtedly shaped much of the stigma associated with suicide today.

The author of this UHP piece has chosen to remain anonymous; she researched and wrote this piece several years ago in part to help explain and understand her own family's complicated feelings about the stigma associated with her father's suicide. The recent death of Robin Williams and the public response to his decision to end his own life reflect, she believes, an evolving and more sympathetic view of suicide in America than existed in the 1980s when her father died.